“If Samsung really does plan to take a bolder stance in its intellectual property battle with Apple, it best clean up its own operations first,” John Paczkowski writes for AllThingsD.

“Consider the wall of apps in this photo of the company’s new shop-in-a-shop in Italy’s Centro Sicilia, which appears to feature not only the iOS icon for Apple’s mobile Safari browser, but the icon for the company’s iOS App Store — three instances of it,” Paczkowski writes.

“Embarrassing, particularly given Apple’s allegations that Samsung ‘slavishly’ copied the design of its iPhone and iPad devices,” Paczkowski writes. “It’s hard to imagine there’s a reasonable explanation for this.”

In a nation which sends falun gong refugees back to china to an almost certain death, why would be surprised by aggressive illegal theft of intellectual property? Perhaps they thought this was normal business practice in the US – after all Microaoft, and now Google have been doing this for years.

But a little bit silly to steal from your largest customer…

… er, your ex-largest customer.

If Apple is buying anything from Samsung in a year’s time I will be surprised…

…and Samsung’s patents are not going to pass muster either – they are industry standards. And so they must licence to Apple at a fair price. However, I suspect Samsung may be excluded from new industry patents after this…

High stakes game… I don’t see the thieving koreans coming out of this at all well…

Yeah, it’s likely this was intentional. Most people are familiar with iPhone icons now, so Samsung is capitalizing on the “familiarity” to get customers to buy into the ecosystem.

It is almost definitely intentional… they see the “A” App store icon and say: “Oh, I know that app… and that one too… hey this phone is kind of cool and has similar/same apps as my iPhone. I also heard that there are more free apps… I like free.”

Yea but show this picture to the phandroids as evidence of how they want to confuse people into buying their products by copying a successful company, and they’ll say “yea but app icons are too general apple just claims they invented everything” I can’t believe they can be soo blind